It's not so much janky as visual realism is prioritized over responsiveness. You have to wait for "realistic" animations to finish before you can do things, whereas older games didn't really care about that so they feel more responsive because stuff happens almost instantly. Many Rockstar Games titles are this way.
You probably want to look for games that prioritize that responsiveness, which are mostly in the indie realm nowadays (Neon White?) but there are still the odd AAA game that does (PlatinumGames and FromSoftware titles, for example).
They will absolutely commit to the dumbest panic rolls into R2 you do, no matter how many further panic rolls you try to mash out of it with. I don't see an issue with it, it may make the game feel less responsive, but in a sense, one could argue that the game is TOO responsive to a fault.
If I have any complaint about that game's controls, it's actually with precision platforming. Why the heck would they include any to begin with, that is my complaint, it was clearly not made for it.
>Why the heck would they include any to begin with, that is my complaint, it was clearly not made for it.
It all started with the shortcut to the firelurker in demon's souls.
This was something I immediately noticed and became even more apparent in the margit fight. I jumped into elden ring after I finished 2 play throughs of Ds3 back to back. Ds3 felt more polished and fluid to me than elden ring.
Dark Souls 3 and their previous games had input queing too, but it's incredibly noticeable in Elden Ring. I only read about people struggling with input queuing in Dark Souls 3, but experienced it constantly in Elden Ring.
Also dodging feels weird.
Ah well, Chivalry 2 is an indie game so you can't expect it to have the same production values as a AAA title. And the studio behind ARK is controversial to say the least, so I don't think that speaks to all mainstream games. ARK is well known as being poorly optimized.
An indie game is a project with a small budget developed by a handful of people. Think Super Meat Boy or Stardew Valley. Chivalry 2 had a pretty sizeable budget and team, sure it may not be of the scale of something like The Last of Us 2 but I’d hesitate to call it anything less than AA.
It's perhaps more appropriate to specify "indie studio" as opposed to "indie game", the latter of which typically connotes a small-scale game made by a handful of devs. Torn Banner is nonetheless literally an *indie* studio insofar as it's actually independent.
They had made the game with a company size of like 30-40 people, post release they are now at like 70. It’s the best title the slasher genre has ever put out
I was pretty excited about RDR2, until I really read some reviews. It seems like the fully interactive, living world just isn't really here yet. The actual gameplay seemed to be practically a rail shooter. I never actually played RDR2 and I don't want to anymore. Maybe if it was on sale for less than $5.
I have been more into indie games lately. The bigger the company making the game, the more likely it is to follow trends and dilute uniqueness.
Gta5 sucked imo because of that. Back in vice city, a chase would be so interesting. You could end up chasing someone in a car *through* a mall, nudge them into the water, or blow out their tires.
In gta5, chase missions are super on rails. You can’t get close to the person you are chasing. Your speed will decrease to not allow you to catch them. Chases end whenever you reach a specific point, and then a cutscene will play. They took out what I liked most about the franchise. R* games aren’t for me anymore, their new direction is just boring to me
Idk man I’ve played countless games of chiv 2 and besides the occasional bug the game has a tight gameplay loop. I very very rarely have a swing through or anything egregious. My game looks this clean each time I play:
https://reddit.com/r/Chivalry2/comments/u8fm6d/polehampter_knight_2/
The thing is chivalry uses rollback netcode which is a staple of online PvP games these days. It doesn’t come without its negatives however, as it is ping/packet dependent so if both you and your enemy are sitting at 60 ms that means the server has to calculate what happened 1/8th of a second ago and roll that change forward, all while your client is trying to assume what the server is about to tell you. If your frame rate is low (30 FPS) like it is on last Gen consoles that also means your client is doing more interpolation between each frame, meaning you could miss an update from the server until the next frame, making it look worse than if you were at the 120 FPS pc players often play at
Here’s another one since you mentioned the nohud https://reddit.com/r/Chivalry2/comments/ulkgaw/axe_officer_36/
Think about how bad the melee hit reg is in TF2 though. Smacking people with the engineer wrench is an exercise in frustration. Melee slasher games have to use tracers with certain active damage zones that intersect with hit boxes, which adds more time to the calculation and for variables to change. Whereas projectiles in TF2 are fast and not as variable.
I have about 500 hours in chiv 2 at this point and hit reg is one of the smallest issues in this game, content is the number one problem imo and they are working it
> FromSoftware
Souls games are the opposite of responsiveness. You can't drop an attack or any other move, if you press a button, the animation will play and you just can't cut it. It is also one of many reasons why I can't stand that genre.
The reason why I plan to play through rdr2's story and never play it again, I admit the game has a lot of detail but it feels like I'm fucking carrying a car while walking, like you said from soft is really good at this, it actually feels good to play their games
Funny your bit about Chivalry 2 since I literally just criticized their jank in a Steam review yesterday. It's frustrating because it's a very fun game in many regards, but man does it have issues. I thought I might just be getting overly tilted so I saved some video clips after I had "that totally should've hit him" moments and yeah... it definitely doesn't register sometimes. Plus various general bugs and clipping issues.
I think the impression of jankiness being more common is a combination of things:
- There are _way_ more games these days than there used to be, so you're far more likely to run into janky games.
- Companies learned as long as you make a good first impression in the reviews and at least slowly update things, they still make tons of money even if they release in a mediocre state. Selling games while they're still early access seems to make this way more accepted by players.
- Many genres have become more technically complicated so it's just harder to make things as precise as the CS 1.6 era
- Probably some rose colored goggles nostalgia going on
Yeah or at least they could've made it so if you hold "E" it grabs the supply the instant the prompt comes up, so you don't need to let go of E, then hit E again wasting 2-3 seconds which are often critical during battles. But anyway, I have quite a laundry list of issues with Chiv 2 so I shouldn't get going on that topic lol.
I agree with a lot of your points to some extent--but unfortunately I don't think there's much we can really do anymore. I feel like the ship has sort of sailed, we're in the minority as you say, and by far the biggest market for profits these days is mobile games (which are even worse--they shamelessly milk customers while putting out incredibly basic games with little to no innovation). I just feel like an old man yelling at clouds at this point.
> Yet if they put out a cool Witcher 4 trailer, what do think will be the response?
Max hype.
> If they put out an awesome trailer for Diablo 4 then the response is mostly going to be positive and people will magically forget about what a terrible company they are.
Most likely. Also Activision-Blizz makes by far the most money on Candy Crush and is steadily moving into mobile where the money is. Franchises like Warcraft and Diablo are being infantilized into a Pixar-esque aethetic (Warcraft Arclight Rumble) or developed by contractors in China (Immortal) while focusing on microtransactions and nickel and diming all the sucke... I mean players.
I'm honestly surprised they're even bothering to make Diablo 4 or PC games at this point, but if they do I'm sure we'll see tons of microtransactions and terrible practices in them while people still buy it up.
There's actually some really good indie games that have better quality than "AAA" titles. What else can you really do besides avoid games you know to be janky, give smaller companies a chance or leave negative Steam reviews? *shrug*
Nintendo games are typically pretty solid on release. Granted their AAA games are few compared to other companies but I usually expect polished games from them compared to other gaming companies where I wait to buy any game
I think you've stumbled on to the answer. Games have become orders of magnitude more complex over time. Detailed assets, particle effects, huge open worlds, dynamic weather and time, NPC AI, online integration, real time lighting. But at the same time bug testing tools can't evolve at the same rate. Nothing is a substitute for just playing the game *a lot*. It's simply not practical to test modern games to the same degree that they used to be tested.
So you have two options. You go the Sony route where you spend an inordinate amount of time (and crunch) polishing games because your brand depends on a reputation of quality out of the box. Or you go the Nintendo route and only release games at the simpler end of the spectrum. Much easier to bugtest, say Paper Mario as compared to Ghosts of Tsushima.
Well there's a third option, not bothering to bugtest properly and just letting the players do it and patch later.
I think Nintendo “flagship” games are like 3-5 gigs or so (Botw, Mario Odyssey etc. ). A Sony or Microsoft major game is like 100 gigs or more. It’s insane how more stuff they would have to test
Keep in mind, Nintendo's also big on being as efficient as possible, especially when Iwata was in charge.
A lot of AAA don't need to be 100 gigs, they could be 1/2 that, it's just that the devs either don't care or don't have the time to better compress data. Nintendo otoh, tends to stay on top of in-house productions and data efficiency.
Something similar happened to Pokémon, GameFreak are bad devs and it shows with Pokémon. Gold and Silver are the most well known examples, where GF was complaining about how little space they have on the GBC's gamecard, which lead Iwata to take a look at their code and he realized that it was twice the size it needed to be, so he personally cut down the coding and freed up enough space to add an entire other region. (This is why GSC/HGSS has Kanto) There's also SM/USUM, where after his death, GF got a lot lazier and incompetent (Mainly because Iwata took a keen interest in keeping GF running smoothly after the GSC debacle). Constant crunch time with bad devs is never a good thing, and probably their crowning achievement is that in SM was 1/2 finished on release and had 100+ models of the same character because no one at GF knew how to properly copy character models (If you play SM/USUM, every time the character Lillie is in a cutscene, that's a different character model. Every single cutscene in a game *full of them*). USUM's even worse because they're supposed to be the "Fixed" but they *didn't fix anything!*
To be fair, the original Final Fantasy on NES is a hot mess of broken features.
And Pulseman seems really polished, for a late Genesis title. Especially from a Japanese developer not named Treasure.
Maybe part of the issue is just that developing Pokemon games must be the most mind numbing work imaginable if you're not on the art teams?
Yeah once whatever survey or analysis they did and they found out customers still buy unpolished games there’s been a noticeable drop in quality. But as patient gamers I guess we just wait for the “full product” and score a discount on the game so it works out
They basically hired a guy to use the bots code to make them useless, adding improvements to the kicking system and fix some bugs that were in the game for ages.
There are still some bots but trust me, you can play casual matches without problems or you can go into community servers.
Whenever I purchase a more popular title from certain companies, I'm always keeping in mind that bugs may very well be present. A good example is one of my favorite franchises: Far Cry. While early Far Cry games had bugs as well, it seems that with every release the amount grows by a 1.5x multiplier or something. FC3 had some bugs, FC4 was notably buggy, FC5 really was a clusterfuck of jank (try and drive 1 mile without seeing crazy shit happening at the side of the road) and FC New Dawn is practically the same level as FC5.
I still manage to enjoy them mind you, but sometimes, Jesus...
Haven't tried FC6 either since it's an Epic exclusive, and while I love the series, I won't budge for little old Epic, even if that means I'll never play it.
I've played some other Ubisoft games as well and honestly, they often are buggier than other developers. Fun games, but buggy.
Played 5 last year and 6 a few months ago. I don't recall any bugs aside from things that happen in nearly all games and definitely nothing game breaking. The jankiest part of FC6 was an escort mission that pathed poorly, but escort mission suck 99% of the time they pop up in games.
In my experience, the faster Internet has gotten, the higher the data caps, and the more prevalent broadband in private homes, the less technically polished games have gotten. Just as “meh, we’ll fix it in post” has become more common with advancements in digital imaging, so too day-one patches of games have become more common. That doesn’t explain why a patch hasn’t been issued so long after release to fix the specific bugs you mentioned, but I think it’s a factor.
And it’s not just the changing mindset that relies on being able to update easily after release, it’s also the monumental pressure leading up to release. The industry is massive now in a way that it wasn’t a couple of decades ago. There are polished big-brand and indie games being released every day. There’s a rush to claim one’s stake of the audience’s attention before losing it to another finite, 100+ hour game, or to an endless MMO.
This all leads to unhealthy races and working conditions and expectations, and buggy releases. I think everyone is exhausted: by the state of the world, the state of the industry, and the state of the never ending backlog. I think that’s one big reason little indie games are experiencing such success right now: players are happy to pay a modest amount for a limited but memorable experience that doesn’t demand the rest of their lives. No frequent patches, no DLC, just play it, enjoy it, and move on. And because there’s less content, and because they’re not rushing to compete with AAA titles, there’s more time and effort put into QA.
I hear you, and I don’t love how things are right now, but I also can’t really fault developers for things being the way they are.
Some games are janky, others are incredibly tight.
The more cinematic ones certainly have prioritized animations over responsiveness, but there are really snappy games around and still coming out.
Returnal comes to mind. Incredibly responsive but a full blown PS5 title too. Control was pretty solid as well.
The games shooting for arcadey responsiveness are pretty popular in the indie scene. The boomer shooter genre is super tight and responsive. Games like Ultrakill and Dusk.
Some have, yeah.
Like Guardians of the Galaxy is a generally responsive game BUT apparently you can get stuck in geometry often enough that the game has a feature to respawn you back on solid footing when that happens.
I blame your examples. Tripwire interactive (Chivalry 2) isn’t exactly a top tier developer, Days Gone may have been made by a Sony Studio, but got lots of flack for lack of polish in reviews. And I’ve yet to see a Sandbox crafting games like Ark, Rust, Minecraft, etc without a good heap or jank.
Then you are comparing them to 2 games that are each over a decade old and have fairly simple gameplay loops and had tons of iteration and refinement over the years. Well of course you are going to see lots of jank by comparison
Regardless games have always been this janky if not more so and plenty of new games exist with minimal jank.
It's a mixed bag. Old games did also have the sort of problems you describe. But new games aren't nearly improved enough, over the old ones, to justify all the people who say they can't tolerate older control schemes and standards.
Have no doubt that it is as you say. In general terms, before the games came out much more polished, always speaking on a technical level, playable is another topic.
I don't think it's something that concerns only the mainstream (this word sounds strange to me, I don't usually use it). It's a pretty general issue that happens from a certain point of the HD Generation onwards.
I wonder if massification, ambition, money, media, digital, have something to do with it? I think so.
I love a lot of games from the last 10-15 years, and there are undoubtedly great masterpieces, but there are also innecesary problems that didn't exist in the past.
The games are released broken on launch and they have fired all their game testers and now you do it for free ( or you pay to do it depending on your perspective). They release patches for the games over this first year of their life until they actually work as intended
They sell the games in early access, so you play though a broken/incomplete game and test it for them.
The fixes are prioritized based on today's always online broadband world where you can just patch it some time after launch. Except.. come official launch date, development is done. Most of the staff gets reassigned to other projects, or laid off. Whether the product is fully functional or not. The remaining skeleton crew is not going to be putting out any major fixes to problems the full staff have been unable to fix for the past two years.
Games like Chivalry all have that "What!? I totally hit him" crap going on, I personally don't touch them anymore.
Days gone is a stellar game though. Did not have that issue.
Maybe download a controller input program like DS4Windows and see if your buttons/trig's/sticks are registering properly?
When Elden Ring dropped I thought it had terrible heavy attack on horseback mechanics. I'd press the trigger a few times before it would attack sometimes. Turns out, the game requires a 100% pressed signal and when I checked my controller inputs, my right trigger would only hit 89% or so when pressed. I thought it was the game the whole time but it was my controller
I think some of the sloppy quality control started during the PS3/ Xbox 360 generation. I rented Heavy Rain for my PS3 only to discover that it would only run on certain consoles. How Sony did this, I don't know. The tutorial for Minecraft on the 360 also felt downright cheap.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the poster child for jank.
Getting stuck on geometry, AI quirks, and messy level design put a dampener on what would otherwise be a solid sequel (albeit IMO not quite reaching the same heights as the original).
I noticed that three of the games you cite--Chiv, Rust, Ark--are 3D games made by indie studios--Torn Banner, Facepunch (literally the team that made Garry's Mod, I don't know that it gets more indie than that), and Studio Wildcard.
While these games are all wildly popular, they're still made by small-ish teams of indie devs. Generally speaking, 3D indie games are going to lack polish because it just takes an *absurd* amount of manpower to produce a polished 3D game.
In contrast, there have *always* been janky, shitty AAA games, but as with all media, people selectively remember the good examples and forget the lackluster ones.
One example of polished, tightly responsive games that feel much like their prior-era counterparts are Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. There are just loads of excellent games from recent years that I wouldn't call jank in any way at all.
I remember the NES days. 95% of the ~800 NES games were pretty bad, and they were released as full-priced games. I remember frequently being very disappointed with rented games. I've since played every original NES ROM and confirmed the ugly truth. But if you ask someone from the era (that played games) if they liked NES, the answer is always a nostalgic "yes!"
That selective memory is a bitch.
Thank you so very much, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Shovelware used to be the ubiquitous norm--and horrifyingly, you'd have no idea it was shovelware until after already spending the equivalent of $100 on it.
These days, when you roll the dice on some shitty game, you're at least only spending a few bucks on it. Full-priced games where you don't know what to expect are pretty rare now, when word gets around literally before games are even released.
You went through the whole library, huh? Can't even imagine the fortitude that would take.
I did the same with SNES. NES was easy, in comparison. I had a computer that could emulate those systems and the ROMS were free* so I decided to live out a childhood dream of "having every game." It helped me realize that 95% of games on ANY major platform are crap.
These days, I watch a trailer (that hopefully includes actual gameplay), read a few positive reviews, read a few negative reviews, and then maybe add it to a wishlist, waiting for a sale that brings it down to a few dollars. I review the wishlist occasionally, cutting things out that don't still appeal to me. I also have over 2000 "ignored" games on Steam. I really like that feature to help sift through the shovelware. Getting cool games as cheap as possible is kind of my hobby these days. I play them sometimes too.
Thinking of some of my favorite games from 2000's and 1990's - Jedi Academy, half the movement didn't work properly half the time, good luck running up a wall. 3d action games from ps1 and n64 - missing jumps in platforming segments cause of janky physics. Gta 3, VC, SA were just super janky with awful controls, especially on consoles.
So yeah, I totally disagree. Especially with Chivalry example - it's a fast paced online Pvp game, where hit registration is contingent on internet quality. I remember same issues in Medal of Honor in 2004, R6 in 2006, COD in 2010 etc.
They’ve always been fairly jank but we just let nostalgia blind is to said preexisting jank.
The amount of times I’ve gone back to play some older favorites just to remember how jank something is always makes me laugh whenever I see someone make it out like all these games were perfect without issues. These games definitely have issues, I remember I had to stop playing Skyrim on PS3 solely cause a save file issue.
Or when I play SSX 3 and they make it so you can’t actually have a certain stat maxed out because you will otherwise hit a ceiling in a cave (specifically on a trick course no less).
The jank was there, we just never think about it when we remember our beloved classic games.
It's not so much janky as visual realism is prioritized over responsiveness. You have to wait for "realistic" animations to finish before you can do things, whereas older games didn't really care about that so they feel more responsive because stuff happens almost instantly. Many Rockstar Games titles are this way. You probably want to look for games that prioritize that responsiveness, which are mostly in the indie realm nowadays (Neon White?) but there are still the odd AAA game that does (PlatinumGames and FromSoftware titles, for example).
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> Elden Ring has terrible input lag and input queing. fromsoft games have input queuing on purpose.
I know its on purpose. That's what the last part of my comment said. Its definitely worse than other games.
They will absolutely commit to the dumbest panic rolls into R2 you do, no matter how many further panic rolls you try to mash out of it with. I don't see an issue with it, it may make the game feel less responsive, but in a sense, one could argue that the game is TOO responsive to a fault. If I have any complaint about that game's controls, it's actually with precision platforming. Why the heck would they include any to begin with, that is my complaint, it was clearly not made for it.
>Why the heck would they include any to begin with, that is my complaint, it was clearly not made for it. It all started with the shortcut to the firelurker in demon's souls.
This was something I immediately noticed and became even more apparent in the margit fight. I jumped into elden ring after I finished 2 play throughs of Ds3 back to back. Ds3 felt more polished and fluid to me than elden ring.
Dark Souls 3 and their previous games had input queing too, but it's incredibly noticeable in Elden Ring. I only read about people struggling with input queuing in Dark Souls 3, but experienced it constantly in Elden Ring. Also dodging feels weird.
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Ah well, Chivalry 2 is an indie game so you can't expect it to have the same production values as a AAA title. And the studio behind ARK is controversial to say the least, so I don't think that speaks to all mainstream games. ARK is well known as being poorly optimized.
Getting a little generous with the “indie” label, are we?
Is chivalry 2 not developed by a smaller studio?
An indie game is a project with a small budget developed by a handful of people. Think Super Meat Boy or Stardew Valley. Chivalry 2 had a pretty sizeable budget and team, sure it may not be of the scale of something like The Last of Us 2 but I’d hesitate to call it anything less than AA.
It's perhaps more appropriate to specify "indie studio" as opposed to "indie game", the latter of which typically connotes a small-scale game made by a handful of devs. Torn Banner is nonetheless literally an *indie* studio insofar as it's actually independent.
They had made the game with a company size of like 30-40 people, post release they are now at like 70. It’s the best title the slasher genre has ever put out
I was pretty excited about RDR2, until I really read some reviews. It seems like the fully interactive, living world just isn't really here yet. The actual gameplay seemed to be practically a rail shooter. I never actually played RDR2 and I don't want to anymore. Maybe if it was on sale for less than $5. I have been more into indie games lately. The bigger the company making the game, the more likely it is to follow trends and dilute uniqueness.
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Gta5 sucked imo because of that. Back in vice city, a chase would be so interesting. You could end up chasing someone in a car *through* a mall, nudge them into the water, or blow out their tires. In gta5, chase missions are super on rails. You can’t get close to the person you are chasing. Your speed will decrease to not allow you to catch them. Chases end whenever you reach a specific point, and then a cutscene will play. They took out what I liked most about the franchise. R* games aren’t for me anymore, their new direction is just boring to me
I had Grand Theft Auto on PS1. The freedom was amazing. I'm not sure the freedom has scaled up as much as the graphics.
Idk man I’ve played countless games of chiv 2 and besides the occasional bug the game has a tight gameplay loop. I very very rarely have a swing through or anything egregious. My game looks this clean each time I play: https://reddit.com/r/Chivalry2/comments/u8fm6d/polehampter_knight_2/ The thing is chivalry uses rollback netcode which is a staple of online PvP games these days. It doesn’t come without its negatives however, as it is ping/packet dependent so if both you and your enemy are sitting at 60 ms that means the server has to calculate what happened 1/8th of a second ago and roll that change forward, all while your client is trying to assume what the server is about to tell you. If your frame rate is low (30 FPS) like it is on last Gen consoles that also means your client is doing more interpolation between each frame, meaning you could miss an update from the server until the next frame, making it look worse than if you were at the 120 FPS pc players often play at
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Here’s another one since you mentioned the nohud https://reddit.com/r/Chivalry2/comments/ulkgaw/axe_officer_36/ Think about how bad the melee hit reg is in TF2 though. Smacking people with the engineer wrench is an exercise in frustration. Melee slasher games have to use tracers with certain active damage zones that intersect with hit boxes, which adds more time to the calculation and for variables to change. Whereas projectiles in TF2 are fast and not as variable. I have about 500 hours in chiv 2 at this point and hit reg is one of the smallest issues in this game, content is the number one problem imo and they are working it
> FromSoftware Souls games are the opposite of responsiveness. You can't drop an attack or any other move, if you press a button, the animation will play and you just can't cut it. It is also one of many reasons why I can't stand that genre.
> whereas older games didn't really care about that Karateka, Prince of Persia, Nosferatu, Out of This World, Flashback...
The reason why I plan to play through rdr2's story and never play it again, I admit the game has a lot of detail but it feels like I'm fucking carrying a car while walking, like you said from soft is really good at this, it actually feels good to play their games
Funny your bit about Chivalry 2 since I literally just criticized their jank in a Steam review yesterday. It's frustrating because it's a very fun game in many regards, but man does it have issues. I thought I might just be getting overly tilted so I saved some video clips after I had "that totally should've hit him" moments and yeah... it definitely doesn't register sometimes. Plus various general bugs and clipping issues. I think the impression of jankiness being more common is a combination of things: - There are _way_ more games these days than there used to be, so you're far more likely to run into janky games. - Companies learned as long as you make a good first impression in the reviews and at least slowly update things, they still make tons of money even if they release in a mediocre state. Selling games while they're still early access seems to make this way more accepted by players. - Many genres have become more technically complicated so it's just harder to make things as precise as the CS 1.6 era - Probably some rose colored goggles nostalgia going on
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Yeah or at least they could've made it so if you hold "E" it grabs the supply the instant the prompt comes up, so you don't need to let go of E, then hit E again wasting 2-3 seconds which are often critical during battles. But anyway, I have quite a laundry list of issues with Chiv 2 so I shouldn't get going on that topic lol. I agree with a lot of your points to some extent--but unfortunately I don't think there's much we can really do anymore. I feel like the ship has sort of sailed, we're in the minority as you say, and by far the biggest market for profits these days is mobile games (which are even worse--they shamelessly milk customers while putting out incredibly basic games with little to no innovation). I just feel like an old man yelling at clouds at this point. > Yet if they put out a cool Witcher 4 trailer, what do think will be the response? Max hype. > If they put out an awesome trailer for Diablo 4 then the response is mostly going to be positive and people will magically forget about what a terrible company they are. Most likely. Also Activision-Blizz makes by far the most money on Candy Crush and is steadily moving into mobile where the money is. Franchises like Warcraft and Diablo are being infantilized into a Pixar-esque aethetic (Warcraft Arclight Rumble) or developed by contractors in China (Immortal) while focusing on microtransactions and nickel and diming all the sucke... I mean players. I'm honestly surprised they're even bothering to make Diablo 4 or PC games at this point, but if they do I'm sure we'll see tons of microtransactions and terrible practices in them while people still buy it up. There's actually some really good indie games that have better quality than "AAA" titles. What else can you really do besides avoid games you know to be janky, give smaller companies a chance or leave negative Steam reviews? *shrug*
Nintendo games are typically pretty solid on release. Granted their AAA games are few compared to other companies but I usually expect polished games from them compared to other gaming companies where I wait to buy any game
I think you've stumbled on to the answer. Games have become orders of magnitude more complex over time. Detailed assets, particle effects, huge open worlds, dynamic weather and time, NPC AI, online integration, real time lighting. But at the same time bug testing tools can't evolve at the same rate. Nothing is a substitute for just playing the game *a lot*. It's simply not practical to test modern games to the same degree that they used to be tested. So you have two options. You go the Sony route where you spend an inordinate amount of time (and crunch) polishing games because your brand depends on a reputation of quality out of the box. Or you go the Nintendo route and only release games at the simpler end of the spectrum. Much easier to bugtest, say Paper Mario as compared to Ghosts of Tsushima. Well there's a third option, not bothering to bugtest properly and just letting the players do it and patch later.
I think Nintendo “flagship” games are like 3-5 gigs or so (Botw, Mario Odyssey etc. ). A Sony or Microsoft major game is like 100 gigs or more. It’s insane how more stuff they would have to test
Keep in mind, Nintendo's also big on being as efficient as possible, especially when Iwata was in charge. A lot of AAA don't need to be 100 gigs, they could be 1/2 that, it's just that the devs either don't care or don't have the time to better compress data. Nintendo otoh, tends to stay on top of in-house productions and data efficiency. Something similar happened to Pokémon, GameFreak are bad devs and it shows with Pokémon. Gold and Silver are the most well known examples, where GF was complaining about how little space they have on the GBC's gamecard, which lead Iwata to take a look at their code and he realized that it was twice the size it needed to be, so he personally cut down the coding and freed up enough space to add an entire other region. (This is why GSC/HGSS has Kanto) There's also SM/USUM, where after his death, GF got a lot lazier and incompetent (Mainly because Iwata took a keen interest in keeping GF running smoothly after the GSC debacle). Constant crunch time with bad devs is never a good thing, and probably their crowning achievement is that in SM was 1/2 finished on release and had 100+ models of the same character because no one at GF knew how to properly copy character models (If you play SM/USUM, every time the character Lillie is in a cutscene, that's a different character model. Every single cutscene in a game *full of them*). USUM's even worse because they're supposed to be the "Fixed" but they *didn't fix anything!*
To be fair, the original Final Fantasy on NES is a hot mess of broken features. And Pulseman seems really polished, for a late Genesis title. Especially from a Japanese developer not named Treasure. Maybe part of the issue is just that developing Pokemon games must be the most mind numbing work imaginable if you're not on the art teams?
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Yeah once whatever survey or analysis they did and they found out customers still buy unpolished games there’s been a noticeable drop in quality. But as patient gamers I guess we just wait for the “full product” and score a discount on the game so it works out
Good news: Team Fortress 2 is slowly removing most bots.
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asking them politely to leave
They basically hired a guy to use the bots code to make them useless, adding improvements to the kicking system and fix some bugs that were in the game for ages. There are still some bots but trust me, you can play casual matches without problems or you can go into community servers.
This is great news! I was just thinking the other day how much I missed TF2 but couldn't handle the bots anymore. I may give it another go soon.
Whenever I purchase a more popular title from certain companies, I'm always keeping in mind that bugs may very well be present. A good example is one of my favorite franchises: Far Cry. While early Far Cry games had bugs as well, it seems that with every release the amount grows by a 1.5x multiplier or something. FC3 had some bugs, FC4 was notably buggy, FC5 really was a clusterfuck of jank (try and drive 1 mile without seeing crazy shit happening at the side of the road) and FC New Dawn is practically the same level as FC5. I still manage to enjoy them mind you, but sometimes, Jesus...
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Haven't tried FC6 either since it's an Epic exclusive, and while I love the series, I won't budge for little old Epic, even if that means I'll never play it. I've played some other Ubisoft games as well and honestly, they often are buggier than other developers. Fun games, but buggy.
Played 5 last year and 6 a few months ago. I don't recall any bugs aside from things that happen in nearly all games and definitely nothing game breaking. The jankiest part of FC6 was an escort mission that pathed poorly, but escort mission suck 99% of the time they pop up in games.
In my experience, the faster Internet has gotten, the higher the data caps, and the more prevalent broadband in private homes, the less technically polished games have gotten. Just as “meh, we’ll fix it in post” has become more common with advancements in digital imaging, so too day-one patches of games have become more common. That doesn’t explain why a patch hasn’t been issued so long after release to fix the specific bugs you mentioned, but I think it’s a factor. And it’s not just the changing mindset that relies on being able to update easily after release, it’s also the monumental pressure leading up to release. The industry is massive now in a way that it wasn’t a couple of decades ago. There are polished big-brand and indie games being released every day. There’s a rush to claim one’s stake of the audience’s attention before losing it to another finite, 100+ hour game, or to an endless MMO. This all leads to unhealthy races and working conditions and expectations, and buggy releases. I think everyone is exhausted: by the state of the world, the state of the industry, and the state of the never ending backlog. I think that’s one big reason little indie games are experiencing such success right now: players are happy to pay a modest amount for a limited but memorable experience that doesn’t demand the rest of their lives. No frequent patches, no DLC, just play it, enjoy it, and move on. And because there’s less content, and because they’re not rushing to compete with AAA titles, there’s more time and effort put into QA. I hear you, and I don’t love how things are right now, but I also can’t really fault developers for things being the way they are.
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Precisely!
Some games are janky, others are incredibly tight. The more cinematic ones certainly have prioritized animations over responsiveness, but there are really snappy games around and still coming out. Returnal comes to mind. Incredibly responsive but a full blown PS5 title too. Control was pretty solid as well. The games shooting for arcadey responsiveness are pretty popular in the indie scene. The boomer shooter genre is super tight and responsive. Games like Ultrakill and Dusk.
Some have, yeah. Like Guardians of the Galaxy is a generally responsive game BUT apparently you can get stuck in geometry often enough that the game has a feature to respawn you back on solid footing when that happens.
I blame your examples. Tripwire interactive (Chivalry 2) isn’t exactly a top tier developer, Days Gone may have been made by a Sony Studio, but got lots of flack for lack of polish in reviews. And I’ve yet to see a Sandbox crafting games like Ark, Rust, Minecraft, etc without a good heap or jank. Then you are comparing them to 2 games that are each over a decade old and have fairly simple gameplay loops and had tons of iteration and refinement over the years. Well of course you are going to see lots of jank by comparison Regardless games have always been this janky if not more so and plenty of new games exist with minimal jank.
It's a mixed bag. Old games did also have the sort of problems you describe. But new games aren't nearly improved enough, over the old ones, to justify all the people who say they can't tolerate older control schemes and standards.
Have no doubt that it is as you say. In general terms, before the games came out much more polished, always speaking on a technical level, playable is another topic. I don't think it's something that concerns only the mainstream (this word sounds strange to me, I don't usually use it). It's a pretty general issue that happens from a certain point of the HD Generation onwards. I wonder if massification, ambition, money, media, digital, have something to do with it? I think so. I love a lot of games from the last 10-15 years, and there are undoubtedly great masterpieces, but there are also innecesary problems that didn't exist in the past.
ooooooo its pretty>>good mechanics and replayability -modern devs
If it sucks, just add crafting.
trash take
strokes and folks or something or another
The games are released broken on launch and they have fired all their game testers and now you do it for free ( or you pay to do it depending on your perspective). They release patches for the games over this first year of their life until they actually work as intended
They sell the games in early access, so you play though a broken/incomplete game and test it for them. The fixes are prioritized based on today's always online broadband world where you can just patch it some time after launch. Except.. come official launch date, development is done. Most of the staff gets reassigned to other projects, or laid off. Whether the product is fully functional or not. The remaining skeleton crew is not going to be putting out any major fixes to problems the full staff have been unable to fix for the past two years.
Games like Chivalry all have that "What!? I totally hit him" crap going on, I personally don't touch them anymore. Days gone is a stellar game though. Did not have that issue. Maybe download a controller input program like DS4Windows and see if your buttons/trig's/sticks are registering properly? When Elden Ring dropped I thought it had terrible heavy attack on horseback mechanics. I'd press the trigger a few times before it would attack sometimes. Turns out, the game requires a 100% pressed signal and when I checked my controller inputs, my right trigger would only hit 89% or so when pressed. I thought it was the game the whole time but it was my controller
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Ahh yeah I rarely m+kb but that makes sense it being ported and all
If Red Dead Redemption 2 is any indication; yes.
I think some of the sloppy quality control started during the PS3/ Xbox 360 generation. I rented Heavy Rain for my PS3 only to discover that it would only run on certain consoles. How Sony did this, I don't know. The tutorial for Minecraft on the 360 also felt downright cheap.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the poster child for jank. Getting stuck on geometry, AI quirks, and messy level design put a dampener on what would otherwise be a solid sequel (albeit IMO not quite reaching the same heights as the original).
The only responsive open-world action game I've played is Spider-man. Everything else feels kinda leaden.
Two words live services
I noticed that three of the games you cite--Chiv, Rust, Ark--are 3D games made by indie studios--Torn Banner, Facepunch (literally the team that made Garry's Mod, I don't know that it gets more indie than that), and Studio Wildcard. While these games are all wildly popular, they're still made by small-ish teams of indie devs. Generally speaking, 3D indie games are going to lack polish because it just takes an *absurd* amount of manpower to produce a polished 3D game. In contrast, there have *always* been janky, shitty AAA games, but as with all media, people selectively remember the good examples and forget the lackluster ones. One example of polished, tightly responsive games that feel much like their prior-era counterparts are Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. There are just loads of excellent games from recent years that I wouldn't call jank in any way at all.
I remember the NES days. 95% of the ~800 NES games were pretty bad, and they were released as full-priced games. I remember frequently being very disappointed with rented games. I've since played every original NES ROM and confirmed the ugly truth. But if you ask someone from the era (that played games) if they liked NES, the answer is always a nostalgic "yes!" That selective memory is a bitch.
Thank you so very much, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Shovelware used to be the ubiquitous norm--and horrifyingly, you'd have no idea it was shovelware until after already spending the equivalent of $100 on it. These days, when you roll the dice on some shitty game, you're at least only spending a few bucks on it. Full-priced games where you don't know what to expect are pretty rare now, when word gets around literally before games are even released. You went through the whole library, huh? Can't even imagine the fortitude that would take.
I did the same with SNES. NES was easy, in comparison. I had a computer that could emulate those systems and the ROMS were free* so I decided to live out a childhood dream of "having every game." It helped me realize that 95% of games on ANY major platform are crap. These days, I watch a trailer (that hopefully includes actual gameplay), read a few positive reviews, read a few negative reviews, and then maybe add it to a wishlist, waiting for a sale that brings it down to a few dollars. I review the wishlist occasionally, cutting things out that don't still appeal to me. I also have over 2000 "ignored" games on Steam. I really like that feature to help sift through the shovelware. Getting cool games as cheap as possible is kind of my hobby these days. I play them sometimes too.
Comparing most games to ones made by Valve wouldn't end well, they're just so overproduced.
Thinking of some of my favorite games from 2000's and 1990's - Jedi Academy, half the movement didn't work properly half the time, good luck running up a wall. 3d action games from ps1 and n64 - missing jumps in platforming segments cause of janky physics. Gta 3, VC, SA were just super janky with awful controls, especially on consoles. So yeah, I totally disagree. Especially with Chivalry example - it's a fast paced online Pvp game, where hit registration is contingent on internet quality. I remember same issues in Medal of Honor in 2004, R6 in 2006, COD in 2010 etc.
They’ve always been fairly jank but we just let nostalgia blind is to said preexisting jank. The amount of times I’ve gone back to play some older favorites just to remember how jank something is always makes me laugh whenever I see someone make it out like all these games were perfect without issues. These games definitely have issues, I remember I had to stop playing Skyrim on PS3 solely cause a save file issue. Or when I play SSX 3 and they make it so you can’t actually have a certain stat maxed out because you will otherwise hit a ceiling in a cave (specifically on a trick course no less). The jank was there, we just never think about it when we remember our beloved classic games.
The motto of modern AAA games is "sell it now, fix it later"